Facebook to offer brands access to a new generation of human-like chatbots

Facebook to offer brands access to a new generation of human-like chatbots

Facebook is set to usher in a new era of advanced chatbots by offering brands access to a new breed of bots capable of negotiating and thinking ahead in a similar manner to humans.

Such a development would further bridge the gap between AI and humans, representing a sea change from the relatively simplistic interactions offered by current gen bots.

To do this Facebook’s researchers are working on ways of training its bots to think beyond the here and now by presenting them with conversations between real people as they negotiated deals. In this way super smart programs can be trained to learn from these experiences and even devise novel strategies of their own – such as the art of bluffing.

Outlining its progress thus far in a blog post the social media giant said: “Interestingly, in the [Facebook AI Research] experiments, people did not realize they were talking to a bot and not another person — showing that the bots had learned to hold fluent conversations in English in this domain.”

At the moment such skills are limited to arbitrary lists of objects, each of which has been assigned an inherent value, but Facebook has high hopes the technique could yield results in a wide range of areas such as facilitating meetings, brokering deals or negotiate the best price on eBay.

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